Parade

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No doubt you have Thanksgiving traditions you love, or remember fondly: gathering in a certain place for dinner, a particular dish that someone makes, football on TV (remember when the Army-Navy game used to be played on Thanksgiving weekend?). For me, it's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

A lot of us who grew up in the New York area think of the parade as "ours," and I have a lot of ties to it. When I was little and my father worked in an office building on Broadway, he took me to see the parade—I still remember hanging halfway out the window and marveling at the scene below. (My mother did the same thing with her father.) In his year as a Macy's trainee, my brother was in the parade—hanging onto a strong wire, holding up a cartoon balloon. My husband used to live right in Herald Square; he'd come home from his overnight shift in a newsroom and pass people gathered in the streets hours before the parade started, many of them carrying signs that said "Hi, Mom!" or bore the name of their hometown.

Even now, I can't imagine Thanksgiving without the parade on TV. I used to snap string beans and peel potatoes for my mother with that sound in the background; now I do the same, but in my own house. If I call her that morning, I'll hear it in her house too.—Diane Oatis

What are your can't-miss Thanksgiving traditions? Share them with us in Comments.